get a flower pot with a hole in them middle and fill it with two parts powered iron oxide(rust) to one part powered aluminum. get a wick and light it from afar and protect your eyes from the searing bright light.

Yeah not good enough, There's probably some files the NSA can extract, from those platters.

There's nothing THAT sensitive on there. Anything on that drive the NSA probably already has copies of anyway, I just didn't want some shifty criminal to dig it out of the trash, call up Western Digital and pay a few dollars to have all my personal files recovered and sent to him, :-P

Unless it was faulty, that was a thoroughly reckless act of wasteful stupidity on a perfectly good 1TB WD hard drive.A good secure wipe would've been enough to prevent any miscreant from performing dodgy data recovery on it.

Once the control board is dead, that's it, there's nothing no one can do with that.

Except replace the dead control board with fully functional identical control board.